Statsguru: India's NFHS highlights some known, and some unknown facts

India’s fifth National Family Health Survey underlines important —some known, some unknown — facts about public health, especially, women’s well-being in the country. The findings of the survey pertain to the reference period 2019-20.

We look at distribution of 10 large and 10 small states of India across eight health and socioeconomic indicators in four chart that plot one indicator against another.

For instance, chart 1 plots states across two parameters: Proportion of children who got adequate diet in the age of 6-23 months, and the proportion of children in the age of 6-59 months who are iron deficient. It shows that more populous states struggle to give a good diet to their children, and it is strongly correlated with a higher proportion of them being anaemic. As data showed previously as well, Kerala and West Bengal stand out as outliers.

Chart 2 looks at anaemia across the two dominant genders at a young age. It reveals that during teenage, girls are more anaemic than boys, suggesting that families still probably neglect the nutrition of girls, compared to that of boys. In a way, it seems that the “meta-preference” for sons underlined by former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian in a previous Economic Survey seeps into imbalanced nutrition outcomes across the two genders.

Chart 3 shows that prevalence of undernutrition is more than that of obesity among adult women. Take the case of Maharashtra, which houses about 130 million people: More than half of women are anaemic, while a quarter are obese. Northeastern states Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Meghalaya do better on both counts than other small and large states. Among major states, it suggests that women in poorer states such as Bihar are generally more anaemic, while those in industrialised/urbanised Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are more obese.

In addition to health indicators, the NFHS also captures education and cultural traits. The last chart correlates two such indicators, revealing that the likelihood of women getting married before the legal age is more if they are less educated. Higher education clearly acts as a bulwark against discrimination.

StatsGuru is a weekly feature. Every Monday, Business Standard guides you through the numbers you need to know to make sense of the headlines. Compiled by BS Research Bureau